Asbestos in digital form. ACPI is another minor irritant that you don't really need forced on the PC user in a half-finished state. ACPI is touted with lofty claims about 'hibernation' and 'instant on' and 'power conservation' but the reality is somewhat different. Aside from regulating the CPU temperature rather more efficiently, ACPI seems to offer none of the claimed benefits (at least on a desktop machine) and several possible inconveniences.

The problem, of course, is that while this lofty ACPI crusade is going on (Microsoft-sanctioned, by the way), all of the existing hardware out there doesn't support ACPI. But It Has Been Decreed that motherboards should use ACPI anyway and Damn The Consequences.

The upshot of this is that unless I do an extremely lengthy, timeconsuming and potentially risky operation to 'fool' Win98 into not using ACPI (which may involve reinstalling the OS and flashing the mobo BIOS), my soundcard and video card (both from the same OEM, natch) attempt to noisily kill each other as the motherboard shuts its eyes and lets everything use the available bus bandwidth simultaneously.

In summary then, ACPI is stupid, and for that matter so are ATX cases (yes, they may be cheaper to manufacture, but how many times have I had to reach round the back to power the damn thing down?). 'Progress' of this kind is bad and should be resisted for as long as possible. Trust me on this one.